In LA there’s real nervousness about turnout – everyone I know is trying to get the vote out

David Hockney once said that he loved Los Angeles because it’s the only city in the world where you drive around, and the buildings make you smile. He’s not wrong about that, but right now it’s all the political signs and placards everywhere that are making me chuckle as I pootle about.

I passed one the other day that said “Urban chicken farmers for Biden”, so it’s good to know the Democrats have that vital demographic sewn up. I even saw one poster with “Tarot readers for Biden” written on it — and presumably they’ve got a pretty good idea which way this election is going to turn out.

In fact, I haven’t seen a single pro-Republican sign anywhere in LA — although if you leave the city and head south into Orange County, you find plenty of “No more bull$hit” Trump flags. (There’s something poetically perfect about a place called Orange County being aligned with this luridly perma-tanned President, by the way.)

But if LA seems uniformly pro-Biden, the consensus quickly breaks down when you ask people who they think will actually win. Despite the fact that a record 64 million have cast their votes so far, there’s still lots of nervousness about whether enough people will turn out to vote, and it feels like everyone I know here is involved with voter registration and mobilisation efforts. I’m trying to do my bit too — from this Friday, my company Second Home’s offices in Hollywood are being turned into a polling station to help make it easier for people to cast their ballot, and a bunch of electronic voting machines have just been delivered.

We’ve no idea how long the queue outside our front door to vote will end up being — but in New York (where voting centres opened earlier than in California), people have reported waits of up to six hours. When I mentioned this to someone in my team, she said: “Well, we’ve been waiting four years to vote Trump out, so what difference does a few extra hours make?”

It’s inspiring to see so many people rolling up their sleeves to encourage others to engage — it shows how seriously they take democracy here, but also how much this particular election means to them. My friend Liba Rubenstein is one of those who’s determined to make a difference — she’s involved with groups like the Civic Alliance and the Alliance for Youth Organising, and she’s cautiously optimistic that all this grassroots activity can make a difference to the turnout. However, another mate — a consultant to the Democratic Party — is more cynical about these supposedly non-partisan efforts to encourage people to cast their ballot. “Let’s be clear,” he said to me when I asked him what he thought of these various voter registration drives, “we’re not trying to get more rural Republicans to vote.” Amazingly, every state has completely different rules about how and when people can vote — and many local areas have their own policies too, so there’s still a lot of confusion out there, and we could easily end up with a contested election, like in 2000.

As another friend put it, “It’s insane there are so many different ways to vote. If we can’t get the voting system right what does this mean for all the other big problems we’re supposed to be tackling as a country?” I’m certainly hoping that Biden wins — and ideally in a landslide to avoid the chaos of a disputed result. For me, that’s the scariest outcome of all. You can well imagine protests and rioting if people here feel the election has been in some way rigged. Fingers crossed none of that comes to pass. After the horrors of 2020 so far, that’s truly the last thing we need.